AI Research Engineer – Operations Research Full-time

Who we are

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards.

As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously.

We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing programme managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications.

The role

At Helsing we deliver AI-based capabilities and the enabling foundation that allow machines to perceive and assist human decision-making. You will have the unique opportunity to shape AI capabilities in one of the most challenging sectors, where high generalisation capabilities need to be paired with hardware constraints and robustness against adversarial attacks.

You will be part of a team focused on advancing defence through reinforcement learning and optimization, where you will design, train and deploy agents to be deployed in complex environments.
The day-to-day

You will contribute to our optimization stack by implementing, improving and extending the current state of the art in operations research and reinforcement learning.

You will contribute to projects and will collaborate with people across several teams and backgrounds.
You should apply if you

• Hold MSc in machine learning with a speciality in either Operations Research, Computational Engineering or Applied Mathematics.
• 3+ years of experience in operational research or related fields, with a proven track record of leading the implementation of optimization algorithms in large-scale scenarios.
• Strong experience in optimization linear and non-linear programming (convex, combinatorial, multi-objective, etc…)
• Have excellent communication skills and the ability to report and present research findings clearly and efficiently both internally and externally
• Are passionate about keeping up to date with current research and enjoy reimplementing / extending papers on state of the art optimization-based approaches
• Possess solid software engineering skills, writing clean and well-structured code in Python and/or languages like Rust, Java, or modern C++, and experience deploying AI software to production including testing, QA, and monitoring

Note: We operate at an intersection where women, as well as other minority groups, are systemically under-represented. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.
Nice to have

• PhD in Operations Research, Computational Engineering or Applied Mathematics, or related fields and have authored publications in top-tier journals and conferences (eg, INFORMS, IFORS, EURO, etc…).
• Experience in reinforcement learning: designing, training and deploying agents in complex environments.
• Experience in design, physical modeling and control of complex and highly interactive systems using state-of-the-art tools and techniques.
• Experience deploying AI software to production including testing, quality assurance, and monitoring

Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields

• Helsing’s work is important. You’ll be directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing both ethical and geopolitical concerns.
• The work is unique. We operate in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, and where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world.
• Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve. Advances in our field of world are not incremental: Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward.
• In our domain, success is a matter of order-of-magnitude improvements and novel capabilities. This means we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already been selected for multiple significant government contracts.
• We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted (and encouraged) to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn’t work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about.

What we offer

• A focus on outcomes, not time-tracking
• Competitive compensation and stock options
• Relocation support
• Social and education allowances
• Regular company events and all-hands to bring together employees as one team across Europe
• A hands-on onboarding program (affectionately labelled “AI-duction”), in which you will be familiarising yourself with our tools and ML pipelines used across the company. This is your opportunity to learn our tech stack, explore the company, and learn how we get things done – all whilst working with other AI and engineering teams from day one

Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.

Helsing’s Candidate Privacy and Confidentiality Regime can be found here.